Is Tomorrow Another Day? The Labor Supply of New York City Cabdrivers

Transcription

1 Is Tomorrow Another Day? The Labor Supply of New York City Cabdrivers Henry S. Farber Princeton University The labor supply of taxi drivers is consistent with the existence of intertemporal substitution. My analysis of the stopping behavior of New York City cabdrivers shows that daily income effects are small and that the decision to stop work at a particular point on a given day is primarily related to cumulative daily hours to that point. This is in contrast to the analysis of Camerer et al., who find that the daily wage elasticity of labor supply of New York City cabdrivers is substantially negative, implying large daily income effects. This difference in findings is due to important differences in empirical methods and to problems with the conception and measurement of the daily wage rate used by Camerer et al. I. Introduction There is a very large literature in economics estimating the wage elasticity of labor supply. This literature has been surveyed exhaustively (Killingsworth and Heckman 1986; Pencavel 1986; Blundell and Ma- Curdy 1999), and a reasonable summary of the findings is that labor supply elasticities for men are very small and often not significantly different from zero whereas labor supply elasticities for women are somewhat larger (though considerably less than one). One criticism of this literature is that the standard neoclassical model assumes that workers are free to set their hours in response to changes in the wage or, al- I thank Orley Ashenfelter, David Autor, Avinash Dixit, Danny Kahneman, Alan Krueger, Robert Solow, and participants in numerous workshops for helpful comments and discussion. Susan Merino, Gregory Evans, Julia Stahl, and Hannah Pierce provided able research assistance. This paper was written while I was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. [Journal of Political Economy, 2005, vol. 113, no. 1] 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved /2005/ $

2 new york city cabdrivers 47 ternatively, can select a job with the optimal wage-hours combination from a dense joint distribution of jobs. Evidence that neither of these is a credible assumption is that the distribution of hours is quite lumpy, with a substantial fraction of workers reporting usual weekly hours of precisely There is an emerging literature on labor supply that is not subject to this criticism because it investigates labor supply responses in settings in which workers are free to set their hours of work. By and large, this literature finds substantial positive labor supply elasticities and evidence consistent with the standard neoclassical labor supply model. In this study, I contribute to this emerging literature by providing a new analysis of the labor supply of New York City taxi drivers. My analysis shows that daily income effects are small, as one would expect in a standard intertemporal labor supply model, and that the decision to stop work at a particular point on a given day is primarily related to cumulative daily hours to that point. My findings are in direct contrast to those of Camerer et al. (1997), who also study the labor supply of New York City cabdrivers. They find that the daily wage elasticity of labor supply of New York City cabdrivers is substantially negative, implying large daily income effects that could be interpreted as target earnings behavior. This difference in findings is due to important differences in empirical methods and to problems with the conception and measurement of a daily wage rate used by Camerer et al. A. Hours Constraints in the Traditional Labor Supply Literature There is a substantial literature demonstrating that workers appear not to be free to set hours and providing some estimates of the importance of this restriction on estimation of the hours distribution. Some of this work uses information, available in some surveys, regarding workers preferred hours of work relative to actual work hours. Kahn and Lang (1991) and Dickens and Lundberg (1993) report that percent of workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage rate, with a smaller fraction preferring to work shorter hours. Ham (1982) estimates separate labor supply functions for constrained and unconstrained workers and finds that they differ substantially. Altonji and Paxson (1988) use data on hours of work in longitudinal data to demonstrate that the temporal variation in workers annual hours is larger 1 This is based on tabulation of the 2002 merged outgoing rotation group files from the Current Population Survey. It is the case that over 50 percent of workers report 40 hours as their usual weekly work hours. While some of this heaping at 40 hours may be due to the natural tendency of respondents to round off, it is clear that there is substantial bunching of hours.

3 48 journal of political economy for workers who change jobs than for those who remain on the same job. Dickens and Lundberg (1993) estimate a model of labor supply in which workers choose among a finite set of alternative jobs with fixed wage-hours combinations. They find that this model fits the observed hours distribution quite well. B. The Emerging Literature on Labor Supply in Settings with Flexible Hours In this subsection, I critically review four recent studies that analyze labor supply responses in settings in which workers are free to set their hours of work. Two of the studies conclude that workers are target earners with negative elasticities of labor supply, and two find that workers have a substantial positive intertemporal labor supply elasticity. 1. Stadium Vendors: Oettinger (1999) Oettinger (1999) investigates the days of work of stadium vendors at baseball games. The stadium vendors that Oettinger studies are hired in the sense that they are approved to sell at games. The vendors are free to work or not work at any particular game without notice to their employer, and they receive a fixed commission rate on sales. Their hours are fixed for any game for which they show up to work to the extent that they are not supposed to leave early. The interesting labor supply margin in this case is the number of days particular vendors choose to work. Oettinger carefully models the factors that make certain games more lucrative for vendors (e.g., larger crowds due to factors such as quality of opponent and day of the week). His analysis accounts for the noncooperative multivendor participation problem that, in equilibrium, has more vendors show up to work games with larger expected attendance. Oettinger concludes that there is a substantial positive intertemporal labor supply elasticity implicit in the daily participation decisions of the vendors he studies. 2. Bicycle Messengers: Fehr and Goette (2002) Fehr and Goette (2002) investigate the hours per day and days per month of bicycle messengers in Zurich through implementation and analysis of a very interesting experiment. Bicycle messengers employed by the company studied by Fehr and Goette receive a fixed compensation per message delivered and are free to set their own hours. The experiment consisted of dividing the company s messengers into two groups (A and B). Group A received a significantly enhanced fee per message for one month, after which the fee declined to normal. Group

4 new york city cabdrivers 49 B received the enhanced fee in the second month. Their results are clear. Monthly labor supply of the group with the enhanced fee increased significantly relative to that of the group with the normal fee during the same month. The conclusion of Fehr and Goette is that there is a large positive intertemporal elasticity of labor supply. The increase in labor supply took the form of an increase in the number of days worked during the month that was partially offset by a decrease in labor supply on any particular day. Fehr and Goette argue that the decline in the daily labor supply is inconsistent with the standard neoclassical model, and they argue that the decline is due to a combination of (1) messengers being loss-averse relative to a fixed daily benchmark or target and (2) a lower likelihood of failing to reach the daily benchmark in the high-fee regime. It may be that workers have benchmark earnings levels that they would like to meet, but I disagree with the assertion that the reduction in daily hours is inconsistent with the standard neoclassical model. It may be that, in the high-fee month in which drivers want to supply substantially more labor, it is efficient for the messengers to work more days but work fewer hours each day. 3. Taxi Drivers: Camerer et al. (1997) and Chou (2000) Camerer et al. (1997) investigate the daily hours of work of New York City taxi drivers. These drivers lease their cabs for a prespecified period (day, week, or month) for a fixed fee, are responsible for fuel and some maintenance, and keep 100 percent of their fare income after paying fixed costs. They are free to drive as much or as little as they want during the lease period. This leasing arrangement is close to the incentive theorist s first-best solution to the firm-worker principal-agent problem of selling the firm to the worker. The core of their analysis consists of computing a daily wage rate as the ratio of daily income to daily hours. They then regress the logarithm of daily hours on the logarithm of this wage rate and find a significant and substantial negative elasticity of labor supply. They conclude that this is consistent with a target earnings model, in which drivers stop working after reaching their target daily income. They argue further that this is inconsistent with a standard neoclassical model of labor supply. Chou (2000) carries out an analysis of the labor supply of taxi drivers in Singapore that closely follows that of Camerer et al. As in the earlier paper, he finds a significant negative relationship between log hours worked and the log wage rate calculated as the ratio of daily income to daily hours. Chou concludes that drivers appear to set targets over a short horizon.

5 50 journal of political economy I am puzzled by these findings for both economic and econometric reasons. Economically, target earning implies that, on days in which it is easy to make money (pick low-hanging fruit, so to speak), the drivers quit early, whereas on days in which fares are scarce, drivers work longer hours. If workers can substitute labor for leisure intertemporally across days, then they should work more on days with higher wage rates relative to other days. This implies very strong effects of daily income on daily labor supply, so strong as to overwhelm any substitution effect. A finding that daily income, which is a small fraction of income over reasonable longer periods (monthly, annual), has such a strong effect on daily labor supply demands careful scrutiny. 2 A second source of concern is the assumption that there is a wage rate characterizing a day that a driver uses parametrically to determine his hours of work. Camerer et al. state that the wages of taxi drivers are relatively constant within a day (1997, 408), and they report evidence showing substantial positive autocorrelations in the hourly wage available within a given day. In contrast, I do not find significant autocorrelations of the hourly wage within a shift. Fare opportunities vary dramatically and unpredictably over the course of a day. In my analysis, I present evidence that within-day variation swamps between-day variation in accounting for hourly wage variation. In this context, characterizing a day by the average income per hour earned that day clearly makes little sense. An important econometric concern, one that is recognized by the authors, is that they are regressing hours on a wage measure that is computed using the reciprocal of hours. This leads to a division bias in which, if there is any misspecification or measurement error, there will be a negative bias on the coefficient of the wage. Both Camerer et al. and Chou address this concern through the use of an instrumental variable estimation in which the instrument is the average daily wage of other workers on the same calendar date. However, if there are calendar date effects on the wage that are also correlated with labor supply conditional on the wage, this instrument will be ineffective in purging the estimated labor supply elasticity of bias. I propose an alternative approach to estimating taxi drivers work hours that is not subject to the same criticisms. I estimate a model of the decision to stop work or continue driving at the conclusion of each fare. Estimates based on this approach, using new data on New York City taxi drivers, show that the primary determinant of the decision to stop work is cumulative hours worked on that day. There are no sub- 2 Indeed, the literature on intertemporal substitution in labor supply as it relates to macroeconomics typically assumes no income effects of shocks to annual income on labor supply (the so-called l-constant assumption). See, e.g., MaCurdy (1981) and Pencavel (1986).

6 new york city cabdrivers 51 stantial income effects, and the labor supply behavior of the cabdrivers is consistent with the standard neoclassical model. Camerer et al. graciously made their TRIP data available to me, and my reanalysis of their data using my framework verifies my finding that cumulative hours worked are the primary determinant of the decision to stop work. Additionally, I have applied their approach to my new data, and I am able to reproduce their estimate of a negative labor supply elasticity. Taken together, the pair of findings reported in this paragraph strongly imply that the difference in our results is due to the different econometric and conceptual frameworks rather than to differences in data. II. Conversations with Cabdrivers While they were not conducted in a systematic fashion, I have had informal conversations with cabdrivers in New York City and elsewhere when traveling for the past few years. The information I have gained is not meant as evidence to test competing models. However, it does provide some information on what cabdrivers are thinking about in deciding on their labor supply. I worked hard to avoid asking leading questions regarding their decision making. I began by asking drivers about their contracting arrangements, and in most cases they leased their cabs, sometimes on a daily basis but usually on a weekly basis. I then probed how much the drivers worked, with most responding that they worked eight to 11 hours in a shift for six days per week. When I asked how drivers decided when it was time to stop for the shift, most said that they got tired after some period of time and stopped. Several elaborated by saying that they would stop if fares seemed scarce or if they got a fare that took them near the garage, often in Queens. Some said they were constrained by the need to get the taxi back to the garage at shift end or, in the case of longer-term leases, to a set meeting place to turn the cab over to another driver with whom they were sharing the car. I then asked if they had an income target that they needed to meet before they quit. With two exceptions (out of about 25 drivers interviewed), the drivers denied having a target, and many reiterated that they quit when tired. I would then ask what would happen if it were a particularly good day or a particularly bad day. The answer was generally that you never know what will happen tomorrow, so why worry much about a single day? Interestingly, the two drivers who said they had a target both owned their cabs. These drivers clearly explained to me what their target was and how it was derived on the basis of their expenses. I then probed by asking (1) how many hours it generally took to reach the target, (2)

7 52 journal of political economy what happened if he got to that point and was short of the target, and (3) what happened if he reached the target substantially earlier than the usual hours? One driver answered that (1) it usually took hours, (2) he would stop if he was short at that point because he was tired, and (3) he would continue to drive after reaching the target because he might as well. This driver did not, in fact, appear to be a target earner. The other driver responded that (1) it usually took eight to nine hours, (2) he would continue driving to reach the target, and (3) he would stop when the target was reached early and spend more time with his family. This single driver did, in fact, appear to be a target earner. My impression from these interviews taken together is that drivers do not consciously behave as though they are target earners. The reasoning they articulate is consistent with a standard neoclassical model with small daily income effects. Effectively, saying that you stop when you are tired is equivalent to saying that you quit because the marginal utility of leisure increased to the point at which it was optimal to stop. Of course, there may be a difference between how drivers say they are behaving and how they actually behave. For that reason, I turn to the systematic theoretical and empirical analysis. III. A Model of Taxi Driver Daily Labor Supply The standard employment arrangement of New York City cabdrivers is that the driver leases the cab for a fixed period, usually a 12-hour shift, a week, or a month. The driver pays a fixed fee for the cab plus fuel and certain maintenance costs, and he keeps 100 percent of the fare income plus tips. The driver is free to work as few or as many hours as he wishes within a 12-hour shift. Thus the driver internalizes the costs and benefits of working in a way that is largely consistent with an economist s first-best solution to the agency problem. In a manner of speaking, the employer has sold the firm to the worker. A fully optimizing model of taxi driver daily labor supply is based on the solution of a dynamic programming problem in which a driver at a given point in his shift (economically, geographically, and temporally) compares his utility if he stops working with his expected utility from continuing to work. While I do not formulate and solve this model, I do sketch its main components. Consider a simple intertemporal utility function for a cabdriver with utility derived each day from consumption of goods and leisure. Let this utility function be additively separable in utility between periods

9 54 journal of political economy where v p (1 r)/(1 r). Solving equations (5) and (6) for lv t yields the result that b (l t ) t t a (x t ) y (1 l ) p. (8) A. Income Effects and the Shape of the Labor Supply Function Equation (8) implies that hours are selected so that the marginal wage from working an additional increment of time is equal to the marginal rate of substitution of leisure for goods within a single period. If taxi drivers were hourly employees earning a fixed wage rate, then y t(1 l t ), which I call the marginal wage, would equal the fixed wage rate, and equation (8) would imply the standard labor supply result that hours are selected to equate the fixed wage rate and the marginal rate of substitution of leisure for goods. The labor supply function implicit in the solution of this problem depends centrally on the marginal utility of wealth (l) and the relative discount factor (v). The marginal utility of wealth is a function of initial wealth, presumably minimal for taxi drivers, and the general level of earnings opportunities (the scale of y t ) over the relevant time horizon. If the relevant time horizon is short, then short-run fluctuations in earnings opportunities will have strong effects on l, and income effects on labor supply could be important. If the relevant time horizon is longer, then short-run fluctuations in earnings opportunities will not have strong effects on l, and income effects on labor supply are not likely to be important. The time horizon is crucially determined by the relative discount factor, v. If the rate of time preference is much larger than the market interest rate (v is large), then the individual is impatient relative to the market. In this case, the relevant time horizon is short and measurable daily income effects on labor supply are possible. In contrast, if v is smaller, implying that the rate of time preference is not substantially larger than the market interest rate, then individuals will smooth their consumption of goods and leisure over time, and there will not be large daily income effects on labor supply. Given that taxi drivers, like virtually all workers, make consumption commitments that span many days (e.g., apartment rental), it seems clear that they are able and desire to smooth consumption across days. In terms of the model, taxi drivers have small values of v at the daily level. The clear prediction is that daily hours worked by taxi drivers are positively related to transitory variation in the marginal wage. Daily income effects are inconsequential.

10 new york city cabdrivers 55 A more permanent shift in earnings opportunities, such as the one that likely occurred in New York after September 11, 2001, and that occurs regularly in recessions, can have important income effects. 3 It is certainly possible in this case that the labor supply schedule could be backward-bending in response to these long-run changes where there is not the possibility of a high wage tomorrow. The prediction of the intertemporal model with regard to transitory changes in the marginal wage stands in stark contrast to the prediction of daily target earnings behavior. Daily target earnings behavior implies that income effects dominate substitution effects so that the elasticity of hours with respect to changes in the marginal wage rate is minus one. In the context of the intertemporal labor supply model, this is an extreme case of a large value of v coupled with (1) a marginal utility of goods consumption that is very large until some target level of goods consumption and low thereafter and (2) very low marginal disutility of leisure until the target is reached. B. Modeling Daily Hours of Work Modeling the number of hours worked on a particular day is made difficult by the fact that the marginal wage function is likely not monotonic in hours worked. In other words, the second derivative of y(7) can change sign. In fact, this is quite likely as the demand for taxicabs varies during the day. Thus it would not necessarily be optimal for drivers to quit on the basis of time-specific lulls in traffic during the day. This implies that there can be multiple local maxima that satisfy the secondorder conditions, and the driver is assumed to be aware of this and select the global maximum from among them. One approach to modeling hours worked is to consider the problem to be consistent with a survival time (hazard) model. The end of each fare is a decision point for the driver. The driver can continue to work or can end the shift. The theory outlined here has several sharp predictions for this modeling approach. 1. The likelihood of quitting for the day is positively related to the number of hours already worked. This is due to the monotonically increasing marginal utility of leisure with hours worked. 3 Das Gupta (2002) documents the substantial negative effect that the events of 9/11 had on taxi driver income in New York City. She also provides some evidence that hours worked per shift increased slightly.

11 56 journal of political economy 2. The likelihood of quitting for the day conditional on the number of hours worked so far should not be substantially related to income already earned during the day. This is due to the intertemporal nature of daily labor supply and the resulting small daily income effect. 3. The likelihood of quitting for the day conditional on the number of hours worked so far should be negatively related to further earnings opportunities on that day. This includes within-day variation in the marginal wage as well as day-specific transitory earnings effects. All three of these predictions are inconsistent with the predictions of a target earnings model, where a worker is expected to quit when income on that day reaches the target level. The target model predicts that (1) the likelihood of quitting for the day is not substantially related to the number of hours already worked, (2) the likelihood of quitting for the day is centrally determined by income already earned during the day, and (3) the likelihood of quitting for the day conditional on the number of hours worked so far on that day should be positively related to dayspecific earnings opportunities as the daily income target is likely to be reached after fewer hours. IV. Empirical Models of Taxi Driver Labor Supply A. The Discrete-Choice Stopping Model As I noted in the previous section, I estimate a model of taxi driver daily labor supply as a survival time model in which quitting can occur at discrete points in time corresponding to the ends of fares. Without deriving the full dynamic solution to the optimal stopping problem, I can derive a reasonable approximate solution that I can implement empirically as a simple discrete-choice problem. At any point t during the shift, a driver can calculate the forward-looking expected optimal stopping point, t*. The optimal stopping point may be a function of many factors including hours worked so far on the shift and expectations about future earnings possibilities. If daily income effects are important, the optimal stopping point may also be a function of income earned so far on the shift. A driver will stop at t if t t* so that t t* 0. A reduced-form representation of R(t) p t t* is R idc(t) p g1h t g2yt X idcb mi e idct, (9) where i indexes the particular driver, d indexes the date, and c indexes hour of the day. The quantity h t measures hours worked on the shift at t, y t measures income earned on the shift at t, and X measures other factors affecting the determination of the optimal stopping time and the comparison with t. Elements of the vector include measures of X idc

12 new york city cabdrivers 57 weather and sets of fixed effects for hour of the day, day of the week, and location within New York City. These measures are included to capture variation in earnings opportunities from continuing to drive. The quantity e is a random component with a standard normal distribution. The individual stops driving at t if R idc(t) 0, and this implies a standard probit specification based on the latent variable defined in equation (9). The three clear predictions of the theory outlined above hold for this probit model: (1) The probability of quitting will be positively related to hours worked ( g1 1 0), (2) the probability of quitting will be unrelated to income earned ( g2 p 0) unless daily income effects are important, and (3) the probability of quitting will be negatively related to further earnings opportunities as captured here by the day-of-week effects, hourof-day effects, and other factors. B. Camerer et al. s Target Earnings Model Camerer et al. use the prediction of the target earnings model, that daily hours worked will be negatively related to hourly earnings opportunities for that day, as a test of the model. They measure hourly earnings opportunities as a fixed daily wage rate computed as total fare income divided by hours worked. They then estimate a regression, with one observation for each shift, of the form ln Hit p h 7 ln Wit X itb e it, (10) where Hit represents the hours worked by driver i on day t, Wit p Y it/hit, Yit is the total fare income of driver i on day t, and X it are other factors affecting labor supply. The parameter h is meant to represent the elasticity of labor supply, and Camerer et al. s estimates of h are strongly negative. An important conceptual problem with this model is that it relies on there being significant exogenous transitory day-to-day variation in the average wage. This is the variation that drives the estimate of h in equation (10). However, as I demonstrate below, there is not significant transitory interday variation in the average wage. Nor is there significant autocorrelation in the hourly wage on a particular day. Thus it is hard to see a source of legitimate variation in the average hourly wage that would drive the estimate of the labor supply elasticity. There is also an important econometric problem with this approach that is recognized by Camerer et al. There is an inherent division bias that can lead to a negative bias in the estimate of h. This bias arises because the wage rate is computed using the dependent variable in the denominator. If the model is not perfectly specified or if there is any measurement error, the estimate of h will be biased downward. They

13 58 journal of political economy address this problem directly through the use of an instrumental variables estimator. The instrument they use is the wage computed for other drivers on the same calendar date, and they find similar, though somewhat weaker, results with their instrumental variables approach. One potential problem with this approach is that there might be day-specific factors that affect both the wage and hours conditional on the wage of all drivers to some degree. To the extent that this is the case, their instrument will not purge their estimates of h of their inherent negative bias. Another potential problem with this instrumental variables approach is that calendar dates on which there is only one driver in the sample cannot be used in the analysis. I present ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates of models like equation (10). However, my data do not have sufficient numbers of drivers on any particular date to replicate Camerer et al. s instrumental variables analysis. V. Data and Preliminary Statistics The data necessary to carry out my analysis are available on trip sheets that drivers fill out during each shift. Each trip sheet lists the driver s name, hack number, and date, along with details on each trip. The information for each trip includes the start time, start location, end time, end location, and fare. In order to obtain a sample of trip sheets, in the summer of 2000 my research assistants created a list of taxi leasing companies from the current edition of the New York City Yellow Pages. After contacting more than 70 leasing companies, one was found that was still in business and was willing to provide trip sheets. We were sent 244 trip sheets for 13 drivers covering various dates over the period from June 1999 through May We contacted the leasing company again in the summer of 2001, and we were sent an additional 349 trip sheets for 10 drivers covering various dates over the period from June 2000 through May Two of the drivers appear in both groups, so that I have a total of 593 trip sheets for 21 drivers over the period from June 1999 through May A few of these trip sheets refer to common dates for the same driver so that I have data on 584 shifts. The drivers in my sample lease their cabs weekly for a fee of $575. Each driver pays for his own fuel and keeps all of his fare income and tips. An unfortunate consequence of receiving the trip sheets in an unsystematic fashion is that I have no information on the number of shifts worked. If a trip sheet is not available for a specific driver on a given day, I cannot determine if that driver did not work on that day or if the trip sheet was simply not provided. This prevents me from examining in any conclusive way interday relationships in labor supply. Completeness of the trip sheets is a concern. Unfortunately, I do not

14 new york city cabdrivers 59 have the shift summary printed by the meter after each shift, which lists the total number of trips, in order to verify the completeness of the trip sheets. As a result I cannot do the kind of careful ex post checking that Camerer et al. were able to perform by comparing the trip sheets to the daily summary printed by the meter. However, for several reasons, it is likely that the trip sheets are relatively complete. First, there is no particular disincentive for drivers to avoid listing trips on their trip sheets. The trip sheets are not used for tax or other financial purposes. More important, there are financial incentives working in favor of a complete listing of trips. In my informal interviews, I have asked drivers in New York about their trip sheet practices, and most told me that they are careful about filling out the sheets, some because of fines levied as a result of incomplete trip sheets. Apparently, taxicabs are stopped by New York City police officers or by Taxi and Limousine Commission inspectors, either randomly or for cause. 4 When stopped, drivers are asked for their trip sheet and a printout of the meter summary to that point. The driver can be fined a substantial amount for each fare that is a shortfall between the number of fares listed on the meter summary and the number of fares listed on the trip sheet. Additionally, from time to time, police request trip sheets as part of the investigation of a crime. In the end, there is no way to ensure that the trip sheets are complete, and I proceed under the assumption that they are. I performed several regularity checks to ensure that the trip sheets are internally consistent, and where they are not, I cleaned the data using a set of reasonable rules. These rules are outlined in detail in Appendix A. I coded the starting and ending locations on the trip sheets into 11 categories. These are Downtown Manhattan (below Fourteenth Street), Midtown Manhattan (Fourteenth Street to Fifty-ninth Street), Uptown Manhattan (above Fifty-ninth Street), the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Kennedy Airport, LaGuardia Airport, Newark Airport, and other. Almost all trips (92 percent) started and ended in Manhattan. I additionally collected data from the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration on temperature and rainfall in New York City. I collected daily average, minimum, and maximum temperatures and total daily rainfall and snowfall in Central Park. I also collected data on hourly rainfall at LaGuardia Airport. A. Shift-Level Summary Statistics There are a total of 13,464 trips listed for the 584 shifts on the 593 trip sheets for the 21 drivers in the cleaned sample. Appendix table B1 4 Das Gupta (2002, 23) notes that the rules governing drivers have become more elaborate and punitive and that tickets are zealously issued.

15 60 journal of political economy contains average statistics by shift for each driver. I have data on an average of 27.8 shifts per driver. I have more than 30 shifts for nine drivers and more than 20 shifts for 11 drivers. Hours worked per day is defined as the sum of driving time (the sum over trips of the time between the trip start time and the trip end time) and waiting time (the sum over trips of the time between the end of the last trip and the start of the current trip). Waiting time is substantial, accounting for 33 percent of working time, on average. Break time averages about 52 minutes per shift. There is substantial variation across drivers in average hours worked per day, with means ranging from 3.89 to Still, the majority of the variation in daily work hours is within-driver variation across days. The standard deviation of daily work hours is The R 2 from a regression of daily hours on a set of driver fixed effects is with a residual root mean squared error (RMSE) of Figure 1a contains a histogram of hours worked for the 584 shifts. The distribution is singlepeaked, with the mode at eight hours. There is also substantial variation across drivers in total fare income per day, with means ranging from $97.10 to $ Not surprisingly, daily income covaries strongly with daily hours with a simple correlation of As with hours, the majority of the variation in daily income is within-driver variation across days. The standard deviation of daily income is $ The R 2 from a regression of daily income on a set of driver fixed effects is with a residual RMSE of $ A labor supply model in which drivers had fixed but potentially different targets would imply that more of the variation in income would be accounted for by driver fixed effects. Figure 1b contains a kernel density estimate of daily income. 6 Column 8 of Appendix table B1 contains the daily average for each driver of his hourly wage rate (total income divided by working hours). These averages show less interdriver variation, ranging from a low of $21.12 to a high of $ The standard deviation of the daily wage rate is $4.48. Most of this is within-driver variation since the R 2 from a regression of the daily wage on a set of driver fixed effects is with a residual RMSE of $4.35. Figure 1c contains a kernel density estimate of the shift average hourly wage. B. Trip-Level Summary Statistics Figure 2 contains kernel density estimates of the distributions of trip times, waiting times, and fares for the 13,464 trips in my sample. I have 5 Income per day is the sum of fares. Tip income is not measured or accounted for. 6 All kernel density estimates in this study use the Epanechnikov kernel. The bandwidths are listed in the figures.

16 Fig. 1. Distributions of hours, income, and average wage by shift: a, hours worked in a shift; b, shift income; c, shift average hourly wage.

18 new york city cabdrivers 63 truncated these distributions at 60 minutes for trip and waiting times and at $50 for fares. These truncations do not change the shape of the distribution since the kernel density estimates in these upper tails are essentially zero. 7 Figure 2a contains a kernel density estimate of the distribution of trip times. Median time per trip is 10 minutes, and the mean is 12.1 minutes. That trips are this short reflects the fact that 92.6 percent of the trips in my sample begin and end in Manhattan. Only 3.8 percent of trips originate outside Manhattan (2.6 percent at LaGuardia Airport and 1.0 percent at Kennedy Airport). Only 4.3 percent of fares end outside Manhattan (1.6 percent at LaGuardia Airport, 0.8 percent at Kennedy Airport, 0.9 percent in Brooklyn, and 0.5 percent in Queens). Figure 2b contains a kernel density estimate of the distribution of waiting times before each trip. Median waiting time is three minutes, and the mean waiting time is 5.9 minutes. There are 2,892 trips with zero waiting time. As I describe in Appendix A, I reclassified 316 long waiting times between fares as break times, and fares after these breaks are classified as having preceding waiting times of zero. Figure 2c contains a kernel density estimate of the distribution of fares. The median fare is $5.30, and the mean fare is $7.00. Once again, the fares (which exclude tips) are so small because most trips are intra- Manhattan. The average intra-manhattan fare is $5.90, whereas the average fare that starts or ends outside Manhattan is $ The small blip at $30 represents the flat rate from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan in force during my sample period. C. Variation in the Hourly Wage Variation in the hourly wage rate of taxi drivers both within particular shifts and between driving days is central to understanding taxi driver labor supply. In order to examine this variation, I computed an hourly wage measure using the trip-level fare and time information. The hourly wage was computed by dividing each shift into minutes and assigning a minute wage to each minute. For minutes during trips, the minute wage is computed as the fare divided by the number of minutes for that trip. For minutes of waiting time, the minute wage is set to zero. The hourly wage for each clock hour is computed as the sum of the minute wages during that hour. Figure 3a contains the average hourly wage by clock hour for the driver-hours in my sample along with the average 1.96 standard errors. There is clearly variation over the day in the hourly wage, with the hourly 7 There are 41 trips with times greater than 60 minutes and 26 waiting times greater than 60 minutes. There are eight fares greater than $50.

19 64 journal of political economy Fig. 3. Hourly wage, by clock hour: a, hourly wage; b, number of shifts and wage wage rising from noon through midnight and falling between midnight and noon, with a temporary peak during the morning rush hour. The variation around the average wage for the early morning hours is relatively large because of the smaller number of driver-hours in my sample during that part of the day. Figure 3b overlays the plot of the average hourly wage by clock hour with a plot of the number of driver-hours in my sample by clock hour. While it is not the case that I have a random selection of cabs on the streets of Manhattan at any point during the day, my trip sheets do provide some evidence on variation over the day in the number of cabs on the street. The minimum is at 6:00 a.m., after which the number of driver-hours increases through 1:00 p.m. The number of driver-hours drops sharply at 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., likely reflecting the change of shifts, before increasing to the daily maximum at 7:00 p.m. Subsequently, the number of driver-hours drops consistently through 6:00 a.m. It is interesting that the hourly wage is much less variable over the day than the supply of driver-hours. The number of driver-hours ranges from one at 6:00 a.m. to 249 at 7:00 p.m., whereas the average wage varies from $18.75 at noon to $25.47 at 11:00 p.m. 8 This pattern is 8 The wage is even higher at $26.30 at 5:00 a.m., but this is based on only two driverhours.

20 new york city cabdrivers 65 TABLE 1 Analysis of Variance of Hourly Wage Variable (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) Driver identification x x x x x Hour of day x x x x x Day of week x x x x x Hour of day # day of week x x x x x Weather x x x Date x x x Date # driver identification x Degrees of freedom used R RMSE Note. The statistics in the table are based on linear regressions with dummy variables included for the indicated categories in each column. The sample used 3,025 hours for which all 60 minutes are either part of a trip or waiting time between trips. Hours that include a break are excluded. The weather variables include hourly rainfall, dailysnowfall, an indicator for minimum temperature below 30 degrees, and an indicator for maximum temperature greater than or equal to 80 degrees. consistent with the number of drivers adjusting to daily fluctuations in the pattern of demand. 9 The lower wage at midday may reflect short lunch breaks not recorded as such by drivers. Table 1 contains the analysis of variance results from a series of regressions of the hourly wage on a sequence of sets of variables. Column 1 refers to a regression with only a constant. The RMSE of this regression (the standard deviation of the wage) is Controlling for driver fixed effects (col. 2) accounts for only 5 percent of the variation in the hourly wage, and the RMSE is reduced slightly to Controlling for the hour of the day, the day of the week, and their interaction (col. 3) accounts for 15 percent of the variation in the hourly wage, and controlling driver fixed effects along with the hour of the day, the day of the week, and their interaction (col. 4) accounts for 17 percent of the hourly wage variation. I controlled additionally for the weather (four variables: [1] hourly rainfall, [2] daily snowfall, [3] daily low temperature less than 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and [4] daily high temperature greater than or equal to 80 degrees Fahrenheit) in column 5. These variables do not improve the 2 R substantially, but the hourly wage is significantly related to the weather measures ( p p.033). Specifically, the hourly wage is $1.04 lower 9 Oettinger (1999) models the labor supply (participation) decisions of stadium vendors across days as a function of predictable fluctuations in demand. His model takes into account the facts that other vendors are making similar decisions and that these decisions affect own income. Oettinger s data include the labor supply of all vendors. The analogous participation data for New York City taxi drivers would include the labor supply of all drivers. I do not have access to such data.

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